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As you read this, try to recall how many times has this happened to you. The development team has slogged for more than a few weeks to produce a piece of art and deploy it in dev environment.

In earlier examples, we saw how prototype in Siebel eScript can be put to use. We extend that here by using prototype together with script libraries and user defined objects.

The last example in prototypes dealt with extending a OOB data type, but that extension was done within the business service itself. Prototype in Siebel eScript can be defined only once and used multiple times, this is better demonstrated with the example below.

Siebel Tools command-line syntax can be easily employed to be used in Windows OS to compile the Siebel Repository Files (SRF). Although this has been a part of Tools for quite sometime now, it is quite surprising to find many implementations using manual means to manage SRFs.

Tucked away in a remote corner in the eScript reference of the Siebel Bookshelf is a single paragraph referring to prototypes. Common to javascript developers, prototype in Siebel eScript is not something that we bother about too often.

Ever missed all the OOP goodness in Siebel? Although not used frequently, user defined objects provide you with some degree of control in hiding complexities in scripting. No, this will not help you attain OO nirvana - but you can start doing things with the custom objects and prototyping to:

If you want to reuse code in Siebel, one of the common practices is to put it away in the business service and invoke those methods. This way of reusing code, though invaluable for complex operations, can become painful when we have simpler objectives.

Even after being in development projects for more than a few years now, I am always not far from being awe-struck at every requirement phase we have had. The process of gathering and validating requirements, and converting everything to specs that a developer can understand, and maintaining traceability through all the rewrites and changes - are the most critical phases that always excite and worry me at the same time.

Siebel 8 (or ST engine to be more specific) has a elegant way of calling business service methods. Script libraries provide the ability to call functions on a business service directly, no more is the need for building property sets and setting the parameters!

“Trace” statements in Siebel eScript (or even in Siebel VB for that matter) provides a good way to debug and know what indeed is going on in the background. It is common enough to use the following statements to do debugging in scripts: